Commentary

The following exchange of open letters deals with a follow-up study
of young-adult illiteracy released by the Educational Testing Service
which administers NAEP

Dear Archie:

"The Subtle Danger: Reflections on the Literacy Abilities of
America's Young Adults,'' is a classic example of a well-meaning
attempt to solve one education problem that, if carried out, would
create another problem at least equally grave. This study is so
profoundly wrong-headed on an issue so important to education reform
that I am dismayed to see it published under the National Assessment of
Educational Progress imprimatur. (See Education Week, Feb. 4,
1987).

In effect, the authors would have the nation's schools replace
Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird with instruction designed to
foster "those skills and strategies that would lead to finding an entry
in a tax table, or to summarizing information in an article on
economics.'' I don't know anybody who is opposed to improving these
sorts of "skills and strategies.'' I certainly am not. You may recall,
from my participation in the public unveiling of your exemplary study
of literacy levels among young adults, that I am as distressed as
anyone by the woebegone average performance levels on all three of your
literacy scales. Indeed, we do need to attend to these matters, and of
course schools have a large role to play.

But the authors of "The Subtle Danger'' are suggesting that
systematic instruction in literacy skills ought to supplant the study
of literature. They do not admit to doing this--and that perhaps is the
most insidious aspect of the publication. Indeed, the document piously
acknowledges the school's responsibility to "continue the difficult
task of preserving traditional Western culture and political ideas.''
But the fact is that changing school curricula or practices in the way
suggested by the study would instantly cut down on the amount of
literature that is taught and read.

The authors try to have it both ways. On the one hand, they say that
their recommended emphasis on literacy skills is not "incompatible with
insistence on a shared cultural literacy, a common core of reading
experience in excellent texts.'' Yet in the very same paragraph they
acknowledge that their main message is "in contrast with those who have
recently reasserted the importance of a cultural tradition in the
teaching of literacy skills.'' And on the next page, they intend this
statement to be both factual and critical: "[T]he primary emphasis of
elementary reading programs, particularly in the middle and secondary
levels, continues to be on the comprehension and enjoyment of fine
literature.''

Would that it were so! But I challenge you to name anyone who has
looked at the American reading curriculum or at the most-used
basal-reader series who would concur that today these are dominated by
"fine literature.'' Rather, they are dominated by readability formulas,
"Dick and Jane'' stories, and well-meaning efforts to vary the
ethnicity, race, and gender of the authors whose works are
included.

Nor do our youngsters come out of school knowing much literature. As
you know, Archie, the early returns from NAEP's 1986 "probe'' of
rudimentary literary knowledge among 17-year-olds show them largely
unaquainted with most of the major works of Western (and non-Western)
literature that can be said to form much of their cultural heritage.
E.D. Hirsch Jr. has found much the same thing in his research. So have
countless college English professors who were reckless enough to
suppose that their entering students might have a passing acquaintance
with Odysseus, Lear, Robinson Crusoe, Anne Frank, Raskolnikov, or Lady
Brett Ashley.

A massive revival of attention to literature within the English
curriculum is one of the reforms that American education most urgently
needs. Yet "The Subtle Danger'' says nothing doing. Its authors instead
urge the schools to "reconsider the literary emphasis in the K-12
curriculum'' and "emphasize those skills and strategies that underlie
the processing of expository prose and non-continuous documents like
bureaucratic forms.''

The authors may retort that they want both emphases and that I err
in thinking they would substitute the one for the other. I wish that
were the case. But the audience simply isn't going to read their words
that way. Consider two recent press accounts of their reports. In the
Feb. 4 issue of Education Week, it is explained that "specifically, the
report recommends, schools should move from a literature-oriented
reading curriculum to one that stresses problem-solving skills.'' And
in a Jan. 29 account in Education Daily, we encounter this paragraph:
"Changes in language-arts curricula would go hand in hand with a change
in definition: from an emphasis on comprehension of fictional
literature to a focus on understanding expository writing that includes
use of data presented in tables, graphs, and labels.''

"We need a curriculum built around problem-solving,'' one of the
authors of the report, Richard Venezky, said in an interview with
Education Daily. And he said something else in that interview,
something that distresses me greatly. Here is the pertinent
passage:

"Venezky, a reading expert who has written 'traditional' texts, said
literature-based curricula embody 'elitist concepts,' excluding
students who need more 'functional' training and 'have almost no
applicability to everyday tasks.'''

Is this the real message, Archie, that literature is elitist and
that, therefore, not everybody should be exposed to what Matthew Arnold
called "the best that has been thought and written''? Are we back to
tracking, confining literature to the college-bound and consigning less
academically-motivated students to puzzling out "everyday tasks''? Is
that the kind of society we want to live in and the kinds of citizens
and parents and voters we want to raise? Or, in a fit of totally
misguided egalitarianism, will we purge everybody's curriculum of
literature on the grounds that it is only relevant to elites and we
wouldn't want the schools to teach anything of that sort?

Shall nobody, then, read "Paradise Lost'' or My Antonia or
"Macbeth'' or 1984 or The Snows of Kilimanjaro or A Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man or Wuthering Heights or the poems of Emily
Dickinson and Robert Frost because they aren't "applicable to everyday
tasks''? Please recall that it was a similar push for "relevance'' in
the curriculum about two decades ago that helped shove American
education down the slippery slope of mediocrity. It was a similar
revolt against serious culture and academic learning that ushered in
the age of electives, of soft, trivial subjects, and of diluted
standards, an age from which we are only just beginning to emerge.

Are we now to repeat that regrettable sequence? Is that how NAEP
would have us solve the problems of illiteracy and semi-literacy among
young (and not-so-young) Americans? Is that the message you want to
send? It is surely the message that is being received.

You and NAEP and the Educational Testing Service are, of course,
within your rights to send any message you like. Similarly, Messrs.
Venezkey, Kaestle, and Sum are free to write what they like, just as
I--and other readers--are at liberty to disagree. This isn't
censorship, and I know you don't take it as such. It isn't even
grant-monitoring; NAEP has other sources of income besides the
Education Department, and I understand that publication of "The Subtle
Danger'' wasn't paid for with government funds. But that isn't really
the point. The point is that lots of people, myself included, take NAEP
very seriously. We heed your reports. We count on you not only for
valid and timely data but also for insightful and responsible
analysis.

This time, in my opinion, you let us all down. It's not that "The
Subtle Danger'' doesn't have good points. It has many. On some issues,
its authors make fine sense. Too bad, then, that one of its principal
conclusions is misguided, indeed so totally off base that I fear a
none-too-subtle danger to American education lurks within the pages of
this earnest, well-intended, nicely written but fatally flawed
volume.

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